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Originally posted by Starboy,+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Starboy,)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteBegin-Technosoul,
What is the correct philosophy about honesty? |
I am not sure exactly what you mean by this.
Sure, why not. As long as everyone agrees that the opinion are held tentatively. It is done all the time. It is called a working hypothesis. Religion is not about working hypothesis, it is about the “truth”.
That is pretty much what they do. Please understand that science is a human endeavor just as any other human endeavor with all sorts of characters making all sorts of claims but if you examine the history of science it is a history of explanations that change based on what is discovered. Sometimes it goes smoother than other times but over time the explanations get better at prediction phenomenon before the fact and better at discovering new science (reality).
Yup, that is it. Only those that had a god’s eye view of reality could ever claim to know reality in its entirety. We are very finite creatures in both space and time. What amazes me is how much of reality we have been able to discover. With my personal telescope and a CCD camera I can observe objects as far a 10 billion light years from earth, this is 2/3 the distance to the big bang. Not bad for a country field on a dark night. But even so, as good as we think we are we can never be sure if we would ever have a god’s eye view of the universe.
If you take the philosophical view I agree, because the philosophical view presumes the possession of a god’s eye view of reality. But that does not preclude us from having a working knowledge of what we can observe that is refined or changed as we learn more. This is essentially the enterprise of science. And of course it is not only philosophers that presume the gods eye view. If anyone is guilty of that sin it would have to be the supernatural religious. They not only claim to posses the gods eye view but to know the mind of god. I am amazed that the adherents of these religions have not all stood up and walked out on these liars long ago.
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None the less, I would agree in all honesty that IS our present status but I must ask if we can, under that guideline, at least have faith in the belief that someday the human momentum towards seeking the truth will result in the final manifestation of something "all knowing and absolute"?
Technosoul. |
Faith, as I have pointed out has definitions and uses that are obviously dishonest. But hope is perfectly honest. You can hope that there is a god. Hope that it loves you, hope that it listens and answers your prayers and hope that there is a heaven and god is going to send you there when you die so on. But to claim as so many of the supernatural religious do that all of those things are real and are going to happen when they do not even begin to pass the tests for reality that we posses, as crude as they are, is just dishonest. It abuses its adherents and makes liars out of all of them. It also creates in them such a confused state of thinking that most of them will commit all sorts of dishonesties in the name of Jesus at the bidding of their religious leaders simply because their leaders have told them to do it. And they believe their leaders because these people have convinced them that they know the mind of god.
As you may have seen in an earlier post in this thread from a Christian adherent, the poster thought that there was no evidence for the theory of evolution. His thought processes are so muddled by what he has been taught by his religion that I am not sure that he even understands what evidence is. What amazes me is that we let these people teach this crap to our young. I have had more contact with these nutcases than I care to admit. These pastors and ministers deliberately tell their adherents to ignore science, to completely discount it. It happens because these pastors and ministers are able to convince them that they are privy to a god’s eye view. That they understand reality in ways that are beyond verification and require and demand that people must take it on faith. It goes well beyond basic dishonesty. If such behavior were found in any other part of our society such as business or government people would be facing jail time but is has been practiced by religion in our culture for so long that no one gives it a second thought.
Starboy[/b][/quote]
In highschool I stopped attending chruch because the preacher told me that the devil had planted all those dinosaur fossils as a deception to make people doubt the Bible. I enrolled in a class conducted at the a musem in our city and to my great satification even dug up a prehistoric camel knee cap which I discovered in this cliff where rain continues to wash away new evidence. (near Newport Beach on the Irvine ranch). I found it below the layer where I had found a fossil shark tooth. That was back in the late 1950s when the idea that humans evolved directly from modern apes was still dominating popluar thought.
My parents got the Bible school guy from our Baptist church to come around to have a little chat with me about my "straying from the fold" and so I asked him some questions about the Bible he could not answer logically and he just told me that it is all about faith, and that people who attempt to answer such questions logically end up going insane. I found that answer somewhat un-exceptable.
But the faith factor was still part of my brain and so the conflict continued as a question mark for later reseach.
One day I was visiting this old white haired man who worked at the musem, his job was sorting through thousands of tiny shells on a big table to find the ones not yet named as a seperate spcieces from the one's already on his list. Being that he was teaching evolution I asked him about God and what his answer would be if confronted by someone from my church, to my shock he thought that believing in God was a good thing and I think he talked about the intelligent design theory, which was not yet being used by religion. He thought that science did not really contradict the concepts of creation.
I was left with a new question to work on, was evolution part of the creationary method used by God to create life on earth? Folks on both sides of the fense had reasons why such could not be the case however I started to become aware of possible alternative interpretations of both sides of the issue that could unit them as one.
It became my new hobby in philosophy to and so far I have enjoyed my insanity and the freedom it has offered me in my orbits of objectivity.
My shaman like perspective resulted in the following anology about life and experience.
A brid leaves the nest to fly upon the wind, but such flight upon the groundless fantasy is cannot be stayed and the bird must always remember the well rooted tree so it can return to that logic when the winds get too wild or when it becomes tired of "thin air" as it's environment, a solidly rooted tree it can grab onto and hold fast too during the night or on real windy days. But it can also take flight into the sky (heavens) and zoom around with the liberty of a UFO.
In this anology the wind is our religious fantasy, and the tree is the logic of science and realistic thinking. A two-world environment for the mind that offers the liberty of flight and faith in our wings, as well as the security of our home in the tree of security.
So it is okay to get nutty as long as you "know the way back home" to the tree where you can rest up during the great adventures in thinking. What goes up must know how to come down and how to land safely (without crashing). Not crash landing is the "key" here to a well balanced expereince.
Whatcha' say?
Technosoul.